Ransome, "Wives for Virginia."

Significant Energy Events in Earth's and Life's History as of 2014

Until the 20th century, people had no idea how their activities impacted a portion of their environment that may end up hastening humanity’s demise more than self-made deserts: the atmosphere. Agriculture and civilization meant deforestation, and there is compelling evidence that the Domestication Revolution began altering the composition of Earth’s atmosphere from its earliest days. The natural trend of carbon dioxide decline was reversed beginning about 6000 BCE. Instead of declining from about 260 PPM at 6000 BCE to about 240 PPM today, which would have been the natural trend, it began rising and reached 275 PPM by about 3000 BCE. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were about 40 PPM higher than the natural trend would suggest. When a forest is razed and the resultant wood is burned, which is usually wood’s ultimate fate in civilizations, it liberated carbon that the tree absorbed from the atmosphere during . , and human activities began measurably adding methane to the atmosphere by about 3000 BCE, which coincided with the rise of the rice paddy system in China. In nature, methane is primarily produced by decaying vegetation in wetlands, both in the tropics and the Arctic, and human activities have increased wetlands even as they made other regions arid. Domestic grazing animals and human digestive systems also contribute to methane production. Atmospheric alteration by human activities has only come to public awareness in my lifetime, but human activities have had a measurable effect on greenhouse gases since the beginnings of civilization, even though the effects were modest compared to what has happened during the Industrial Revolution, as humans burn Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits with abandon.

People on the edge of starvation will rarely if ever display enlightened activities in relationship to their environment or each other, as they battle for survival. Early farmers could see the effects of deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion, but gentle, sustainable practices were often defeated by market forces, imperial prerogatives, and warfare. What could be obvious to farmers was not evident to potentates sitting on distant urban thrones, merchants, or money-changers, and as the city conquered what became the hinterland, short-term economic plunder took precedence over long-term environmental management far too frequently.

Darwin , but believed that natural selection primarily worked at the individual level. The idea of group selection has , if . Anthropologists and biologists see evidence of group selection, not only in social creatures such as , but also in the ability of human societies to survive competition with their neighbors. Hunter-gatherer societies eliminated disruptive members by , which has been argued to have been reflected genetically in eliminating uncooperative people from society. Those kinds of activities may have helped cull the human herd of “uncooperative” genes. When Europe conquered the world, it had the highest energy usage, by far, of any peoples on Earth, which was why it always prevailed. When high-energy societies met low-energy societies, the results were almost always catastrophic for low-energy societies. Hunter-gatherer societies have no chance in a competition with societies possessing domesticated plants and animals, much less industrialized societies. Whether they are species or human civilizations, the determines their viability.

c. 4.6 billion years ago (“bya”)

Today, people practicing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle are usually dependent on the production of nearby agricultural societies. Pure hunter-gathering, of the kind performed before the Domestication Revolution, has almost entirely vanished.

Concentrated application of muscle energy.

Earth's human population reached a billion people in the first decade of the 19th century, which was about on the eve of the Domestication Revolution, and 100 times Earth's estimated carrying capacity in the absence of agriculture and domesticated animals. Although , the median UN estimate as of 2010 is that Earth's human population will reach 10 billion people by 2100. Only industrialized farming methods , and estimates of Earth's carrying capacity after we run out of fossil fuels , particularly with . Humanity's fate, in many ways, rides on the energy issue, and almost everything else is of little consequence.

The most complex aquatic ecosystem appears.

Although , it began its institutionalization with Europe’s conquest of the world. For the first time ever, a person could board a ship in a land of people with skin of one color and disembark and see people with skins of markedly different colors. Also, since the people with non-white skin that Europeans encountered were always exploited, slaughtered, or dispossessed, their differing skin color became part of the abuse-justifying ideology of the conquerors. Racism reached its zenith in the USA, which in scale, intensity, and duration is . The racism always had an underlying economic rationale, which justified the genocide of Indians, enslavement of Africans, horrific treatment of East Asians, today’s agricultural labors of Latinos, and so on. When Europeans fought each other in the imperial age, they had a rather gentlemanly way of fighting and treating captured prisoners, but when the opponents were Indians, for instance, scalping them, making clothing from their skins, and the like was standard behavior. The “souvenirs” were in that they had white skin on them. That kind of behavior was evident from the , and during the USA’s theft of temperate North America, its . Intentionally onto the Indians was part of the British bag of tricks, and hunting Indians like animals was a favorite sport of both and .

Energetic basis for land-based ecosystems appears.

Capitalism radically changed the way that people worked. While court historians for capitalism glossed over the awesome human toll of industrialization, some dissent came from ignored corners until Marx. In the 20th century, histories that focused on working class struggles against the capitalists were in the great minority and never promoted by capitalist-controlled presses. The British had a working-class press , after governmental efforts failed to destroy it. The USA has never had a working-class press, and works such as Howard Zinn’s only appeared late in the 20th century. , including factory work as a boy and his father’s incarceration in a debtor’s prison, to write his great works.

Recent

Organisms begin to capture chemical energy.

In an event that favors the hypotheses of climate-change advocates, there was a dip in global temperatures , which lasted for a few centuries. It was probably caused by remnants of the North American ice sheets melting and the resultant flush of freshwater into the North Atlantic. It was a less severe event than the , but it still caused epic droughts around the world. Some scientists think that the uncertainty caused by those cooling events helped spur agriculture, to enhance food security. Climate change from that event could be why Çatal Höyük was abandoned, and Tell Abu Hureyra survived the event, to only be abandoned several centuries later when another major dip in global temperatures occurred.

Organisms begin to directly capture photonic solar energy.

In other words, the motivation was primarily economic, usually after depleting the energy resources of the lands that they migrated from, whether they were megafauna, forests, or soils. After the Neolithic Expansion, migrations that displaced the natives seem rare, at least until . That is the general pattern that I have noticed, but as I write this. During , in which about the only immigrants were European men with dreams of riches or captured African men who looked forward to short lives of slavery, the surviving native women became concubines for the invaders and native male DNA vanished from the genome. Recent research regarding Puerto Rico showed a .

Allows for more energetic respiration than anaerobic respiration.

Those imperial games of indoctrination, apology, censorship, obfuscation, and turning reality upside-down are highly relevant to the West’s economic trajectory, and are leading reasons why FE and its potential outcomes reside outside the realm of possibility for the world’s people, particularly those living in industrial societies. not endorsed by the scientific establishment and its patrons are today, and this is arguably the greatest triumph of humanity’s social managers. When people encounter the of FE, they almost invariably have reactions of denial that range from to to . For those of us who that , witnessing that entrenched denial can be quite a spectacle. That subject will be , but the development of industry, science, and political-economic ideologies, even though they are inextricably entangled with imperial dynamics, deserve much more treatment.

Reviews

“ In summary, the industrialization of the UK, the USA, and Europe was greatly enabled via robberies on an epic scale, such as entire continents. Where the people could not be easily eradicated or where tropical diseases decimated the invaders, the conquerors “only” enslaved them as they turned their economies into mines and plantations for the conquerors' benefit. Most of humanity’s misery today is a legacy of those activities and a key dynamic of the , as the world’s poor are destroying the habitats of the world’s endangered species in order to eat. ”

, to eventually achieve modern levels, begins

c. 850-420 million years ago ("mya")

Gallery First large-scale energy users.

First complex ecosystems appear.

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Beginning in 1875, El Niño events precipitated famines that took the lives of tens of millions of people, in China and India in particular. While India was starving, its wheat exports to the UK quadrupled. In the two millennia before British hegemony, India had less than one famine per century. Under British rule, famines happened every few years, for about a 3,000% increase in frequency. In the midst of the carnage, British “philanthropists” , but India’s native scholars noted that the railroads were built to take the plunder India, not bring needed food and other goods to its masses. A similar railroad plunder route was built during the . Europeans could not invade equatorial Africa until they began to use quinine to prevent malaria. The situation with malaria and quinine was another one in which practice was ahead of theory. , but the cause of malaria was . Similarly, even though Europe’s early voyages to were accompanied by scurvy that the and other plants high in vitamin C, millions of sailors died of scurvy in the succeeding centuries as the medical authorities of the day ignored the cures. The British navy finally began to use limes to prevent , but vitamin C was not isolated and .